Trade

In mid-September, the African Development Bank, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank will launch Financing Africa: Through the Crisis and Beyond , a comprehensive review documenting current and new trends in Africa’s financial sector and taking into account Africa’s many different experiences. During the coming weeks and leading up to the formal launch of the book in Ethiopia on September 15, we will give a sneak peek of the book’s main findings and recommendations. In this first post, we’ll summarize our main messages.

Editor's Note: Murat Seker recently presented the findings of the paper discussed in the following blog post at a session of the FPD Academy. Please see the FPD Academy page on the All About Finance blog for more information on this monthly World Bank event series.

Many studies point to the importance of firms that export to economic growth and development. These firms tend to be larger, more productive, and grow faster than non-exporting firms. These findings have focused policymakers’ attention on the importance of international trade for economic growth. From the 1980s to the 2000s traditional trade policies have improved significantly—applied tariff rates across a wide range of countries with varying levels of income have decreased from around 25 percent to 10 percent. However, improvements in trade policies are often not enough to reap the full benefits of international trade. To be fully effective, they require complementary reforms that improve the business environment for firms. In a recent paper on Rigidities in Employment Protection and Exporting, I focus on a particular aspect of the business environment, namely employment protection legislation (EPL), and show how these regulations relate to the decisions of firms to enter export markets.1

Evidence shows that export market entry is associated with significant changes and adjustments in firm performance around the time at which exporting begins. In data collected via the Enterprise Surveys project, the employment levels of firms that subsequently enter export markets ("future-exporters") grow by 13%, four times higher than the growth rate of firms that don’t enter export markets.2 Bernard and Jensen (1999) find that the growth premium for these future-exporters as compared to non-exporters in the U.S. is 1.4% per year for employment and 2.4% for shipments.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can theoretically reduce income gaps between developing and advanced economies. In a neoclassical world, with perfect capital mobility and technology transfer, capital readily flows from rich to poor countries, seeking higher returns in capital-scarce economies. The real world differs starkly from the theory.

Even though southern African countries (the Southern African Development Community, SADC hereafter) are poor on average, per capita FDI inflows are a meager 36.6 U.S. dollars per year (in 2000 value), which is about 18 percent of average per capita FDI in non-SADC countries and 58 percent of the average level for similar-income economies. Moreover, within SADC, country differences are huge: FDI per capita ranges from single digits (Malawi, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania) to 10-30 dollars (Mozambique, Zambia, Mauritania, and Swaziland), to 50 to 100 dollars (Lesotho, South Africa, and Angola), and to 167 dollars in the outlier in this region, middle-income Botswana. And even within this region there is a positive relationship between average income and FDI per capita, a pattern that holds for the world as a whole. Thus, any hope of relying on FDI as a supply-side remedy to catapult poor countries onto a development fast track is not likely to materialize soon.